Saturday, April 7, 2007

Did Labour - not the Tories - finish off Ted Heath's dying wish?

It's funny how fusty old minutes can point to misleading press reports. The Western Daily Press reported this in March:

SIR TED'S LEGACY TO THE NATION SCUPPERED BY TORIES

As a former Conservative Prime Minister his dying wish was to have a museum built in his memory at the place he loved the most.So it has come as something of a shock that Sir Ted Heath's final request that his beloved home be opened to the public has been left in tatters by one of the region's truest, bluest councils.

When I repeated that story, an anonymous commenter wrote: "The veto came from the Labour grouping". This led me to modify my posting and patiently wait for the minutes of the relevant planning meeting to be published. They seem to bear out the commenter's statement. The meeting on 8th March had seven Labour, five Conservative and two Liberal Democrat councillors present on the committee. The vote for the museum plan wasn't recorded. But the meeting attendance numbers suggest that the Conservatives could certainly not have vetoed the plan on their own. The council might be "Conservative dominated" but the committee in question is "Labour dominated".

For the record my calculations relevant to councillor names are (crikey, I can't believe I am being such an anorak!):